CBR BINGO: Farenheit 451 While I was fishing around trying to find a banned or controversial book for this review, I stumbled across several articles written in 2016 about a 15-year-old girl in a school district near me. When Jeannette Walls’ memoir, “Glass Castle” was removed from the 9th grade reading list at her school, this young woman was having none of it. She challenged her school district at a board meeting and very succinctly pointed out that the material that the parents were objecting to […]
“A True-Life Novel”
This is undoubtedly one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read. And I have read a lot of memoirs! It helps that Jeannette Walls is incredibly talented, as I already knew from having read The Glass Castle and The Silver Star. But her subject here is really what makes this book stand apart from so many others. “You can’t prepare for everything life’s going to throw at you. And you can’t avoid danger. It’s there. The world is a dangerous place, and if you sit […]
Quick, and Fun, Like Riding a Bike (Not a Bronco)
Half Broke Horses is a “true-life” novel, meaning that Walls took all the stories she had heard and collected about her grandmother and wove them into a narrative, smoothing them into place in a coherent timeline. Since the novel is written in the first person, she admits to assuming her grandmother’s thoughts and exact words, and it’s probably best to just treat the whole thing as probable fiction – beyond that, though, many of the stories kind of defy belief! From learning to fly a […]
A Glass Castle is a Perfect Metaphor
I typically write my reviews in a timely fashion. In fact, I typically have a rule that I can’t start my next book until I write my review. It keeps me honest, up to date and together (because I always want to start the next book). Well, rules went out the window after reading this book. I have no idea what it is about it, but I was altered by The Glass Castle. I didn’t want to write about it, I didn’t want to stop thinking about […]